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Independent Developers Contribute A Lot To Mesa, X.Org

Phoronix: Independent Developers Contribute A Lot To Mesa, X.Org

Next Tuesday at XDC2011 Chicago I am hosting a Q&A panel about contributing to X.Org and open-source projects, where the panel participants are largely comprised of well known X.Org and Mesa developers that began contributing while at university. In hopes of sparking new contributors to these key open-source projects, computer science students from the major Chicago universities have been invited to attend this panel discussion and anyone else wishing to learn more about open-source development. In preparation for this panel, I have been collecting some new development statistics on Mesa and X.Org.

Interesting stats. Thanks for assembling these. The growth in Mesa line count was a bit of a surprise but I guess it shouldn't have been.

I noticed one odd thing -- for both Mesa and X the average "character per line" count is almost exactly 100, obtained by dividing #lines by #files to get average file line count then dividing average file size by average line count to get characters per line.

I thought it was odd that the number was so close for the two projects and also that it was so high. It suggests a very high degree of comments and white space but I don't remember seeing that level of commenting when I look through the code.

what happened at the end of 2003 that blew up the line count for the X server?

The X.Org project was started. Anything for X.Org before that is something merged in later with an earlier git-author-date (perhaps developed for XFree86 or the old X11 releases) and is really just noise. The initial import of code from X11R6.6 & XFree86 4.3 is dated in git as "Fri Nov 14 2003".